That evening Willie and I were outside the Hilton watching the limos roll up when it began drizzling. By then the police had the sidewalk in front of the joint cordoned off to keep riffraff like us at a safe distance. Willie and I were huddled under the umbrella when I saw Dorsey O’Shea get out of a long black limousine.
She had apparently been shopping in Paris; the outfit she was wearing was definitely not off a rack. She strolled across the red carpet looking neither right nor left and disappeared into the maw of the hotel while the limo driver and bellman wrestled with her luggage, four hard brown suitcases and a smaller vanity case. I would have bet my last dollar those suitcases were leather.
So that’s the way my life was shaking out. I was standing on the sidewalk in the rain under a too-small umbrella that I was sharing with an ex-con when the multizillionaire hot woman that I wasn’t good enough for marched into the Hilton on her way to a penthouse suite. They weren’t going to put her in one of the suites I had bugged, according to Sarah Houston. Oh, too bad! It would have been fun to hear what in the world she was up to.
And yet, it wouldn’t. The last thing I needed was to listen to Dorsey and some schmuck getting it on in a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suite overlooking Manhattan. And she would probably pick a schmuck, like that outside artist I ran off. After the episode with the porno movie dude, I knew Dorsey’s taste in men was undiscriminating, to say the least. Hell, she had even rolled in the hay with me. I rest my case.
“Wanta go get a toddy?” Willie asked.
“Like what?”
“Like an Irish coffee.”
“How about Scotch on the rocks?”
“Man, if you’re buying I’ll drink any damn thing except soda pop.”
So away we went, two really cool unattached dudes with money in our jeans, out on the town in the Bad Apple on a Sunday night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Monday morning the sun illuminated a hazy, gauzy summer sky. The humidity was already high and going higher at seven in the morning when we set out from New Jersey for Manhattan. Joe Billy Dunn, Willie Varner, and I were in the van, and Sarah Houston was still sacked out in her motel room, which she announced last night was a far cry from her digs at the Hilton. Her observation almost broke my heart. Slumming can be so hard on a girl.
“I have to go back to Washington this evening,” Joe Billy said. “I thought I’d hop a train this afternoon.”
“Can’t you tell them you’re still sick?” He had called in sick before we left the motel.
“No. And I haven’t earned enough vacation to get days off. It’s back to work or go looking for another job.” Fortunately Sarah had taken a week’s vacation, so I knew I could count on her. That is, if and when she woke up and got sufficiently caffeinated to be of some use.
“Maybe we could take Joe Billy on at the lock shop,” Willie said to me. “He could sweep out and work the counter while we teach him how to duplicate keys and stuff.”
“Maybe you could sorta cut class like I’m doing and hope everything shakes out okay,” I said, and turned the rearview mirror so I could see Dunn’s face. “After we’ve saved the free world from the forces of evil, all will be forgiven.”
Joe Billy made a rude noise. “With your luck, Carmellini, you’re going to be still rotting in prison when they find a cure for the common cold.”
“Hey, man, don’t be so negative,” Willie chided. “Too early for bad vibes.”
“Take a train,” I told Joe Billy. “The Musketeers will soldier on without you.”
“Mail me a little medal when you get your big ones, okay?”
“Negativity sucks, you know?” Willie said, continuing his soliloquy. “You gotta think positive as you travel the road of life. Tommy gets prosecuted, they’ll probably let him plead to desecration of a body or obstructin’ justice, something like that. Hell, he’ll only be in eight, ten years max.”
“Desecration of a body?”
“Yeah. You know, fuckin’ a corpse, something along those lines. Tommy will make out all right. Have faith.”
Easy enough for Willie to say, but mine was shaken an hour later, after we parked on a narrow east-west street just north of the Hilton. Willie was listening on the bugs, I was working the computer making a digital recording, and Joe Billy was munching a banana, three spies in the house of love, when Willie asked, “Who in hell are these people, anyway?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“You listen a while. You tell me what we’re listenin’ to.” He handed me the earphones.
A guy and a gal, talking about getting it on with another couple they knew from Tampa. The guy sounded lukewarm, the woman enthusiastic, trying to persuade him.
“What suite are they in?”
“Royston’s.”
“Naw.”
“Yep.”
“These aren’t the right people. That couldn’t be Royston. His wife is in Washington.”
“For Christ’s sake, I know that, Tommy. These are two goddamn swingers from California. They were talking about car dealerships in L.A. a minute ago. Who are they?”
I called Sarah Houston, woke her up, sounded like. “We’ve got a problem. Get on your computer and find out who the hotel put in these suites we bugged.”
“Please.”
“Get on your computer, please.”
“Okay.”
She called back twelve minutes later. “They’re registered as a Mr. and Mrs. Bronson Whitworth from Beverly Hills, California.”
Joe Billy and Willie were both wearing earphones now. “It’s the woman she’s got the hots for,” Joe Billy said gleefully. “This one’s a switch-hitter.”
“What suite did the hotel put Royston in?”
I slapped one phone on my left ear in time to hear the woman say, “Bronnie, you can watch. You know how much you enjoy that.”
He didn’t think the convention was the place.
“Royston’s party is in Penthouse Ten, Twelve, and Fourteen,” Sarah said.
“We bugged Fifteen, Seventeen, and Nineteen.”
“A delegation from California got all three of those suites. Someone shuffled the parties around. There is a notation in Royston’s reservation about a good view. Royston must have demanded a view room.”
“What suite is Dorsey O’Shea in?”
In the silence that developed while she checked, I heard the woman in the suite cooing softly in my left ear.
“They’re gettin’ it on,” Willie announced gleefully. “She’s goin’ to screw him around to her way of thinkin’.”
“God almighty,” Joe Billy said with a smile on his face. “Wish we had put a little video camera in there.”
“What is going on?” Sarah asked. Apparently she could hear the comments of my colleagues.
“Gimme Dorsey’s room number, huh? I don’t want to run into her when I’m in the hotel trotting around.”
“You’re going in again?”
“Someone has to move the bugs. I planted everything we brought.”
“Twelve twenty-one,” she said crisply. Then she added with a trace of envy in her voice, “She paid several hundred extra for the room. It must be a small suite.”
“Next time around inherit some money, please,” I snarled, and snapped the cell phone shut. Damn women, anyway.
Years ago I learned that prior planning prevents piss-poor results. I call it my P5R rule. Sarah could check to ensure the master code I had put in my plastic door pass the other day was still in use. Or I could put in the new code. Getting into the rooms was not the problem.
However, getting in without arousing the suspicions of the people monitoring the hallway surveillance cameras was a problem. Unfortunately my suit, white shirt, and tie were in the motel room in New Jersey, and I didn’t want to drive two hours to retrieve them. Should have brought them along, just in case.